The crashing while opening a project is apparently some kind of iLok software issue. Quoted from gearspace -
“seems to be related to PACE/iLok protection in their case which seems to corrupt memory leading other vendors' plugins to crash“
“ I contacted Fabfilter about it, since their plugins get mentioned in the crash report most often for me. They confirmed it's some kind of cross-plugin memory corruption caused by Pace / iLok, and that they're in contact with several other developers to try and trace it and solve it collectively”
I’ve had this happen and it is very annoying the workaround is to open a new empty project, load one of the recently mentioned plug-ins that crashed, close that project and then open the one you were trying but was crashing.
At least that way you can open the project but the rest you were talking about I don’t know and it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the project being big or not
Try to refrain from pulling out all of your hair